CFUNITED Day 1: Wednesday, June 29, 2005

 
Jul 01, 2005

by Judith Dinowitz

CFUNITED was a dream conference. The content was excellent, the people were courteous, the conference was well organized, and the hotel service was exceptional. For example, at the MMUG Manager's Day, the group ate in one of the hotel restaurants for lunch. The waiter brought Michael and myself kosher meals without hesitation, and knew exactly what to do to prepare them.

I spent most of my time at the Community Center, but enjoyed the presentations I did attend. In several cases, I felt that the sessions were not long enough, and needed ten minutes more for the audience's questions and answers. I'll be covering the keynotes and the main themes of the conference in this article. Individual session reviews will be published separately.

The first keynote of the conference was given by two of Macromedia's powerhouse speakers, Tim Buntel (Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion MX) and Ben Forta (Macromedia Senior Product Evangelist.) The session was packed with information and announcements. Ben Forta started the keynote with a look at some useful aspects of ColdFusion MX that may have gotten lost in the hype. One gem CFMX programmers may have overlooked is the Admin API that gives them programmatic control over the ColdFusion Admin. Rather than using the Service Factory to gain access to Administrator functionality, ColdFusion MX 7 allows direct API interfaces into the administrator. This is especially important, as the service factory is unsupported. The Admin API is implemented as a series of CF Components. You can find out more about the Admin API in the Livedocs entry.

With all of the excitement about Flash forms and printing and reporting, one might not have realized that CFMX 7 has new verity enhancements. Its new K2 server has a faster engine, more file formats, and can search in more languages. The enhanced verity searching allows users to highlight matches in their search results, and bring up possible close matches to weed out misspellings.

Other improvements in CFMX 7 include a better charting engine, the ability to use XML skins for charts and forms, XML validation and SOAP integration enhancements.

Once Forta had covered the basics, Tim Buntel stepped in by introducing a developer from Georgetown University, who showed off an application that made great use of the new Flash Forms in ColdFusion. The presenter, Amit Yathirajadasan, showed an application that certainly didn't look like the traditional forms page, and explained how ColdFusion MX 7 has greatly helped students and teachers at Georgetown University.

With the tech talk over, it was time for the big announcements. First, Forta said that a new CFMX 7 updater (codenamed Merrimack) would be coming out in beta later this year. With the release of this updater, Macromedia will also be providing advanced platform support for the Mac OSX installer, something many Mac users have been waiting for. Other new things in the updater include a CFC Proxy, which facilitates calling CFCs directly from a JAR file, and enhancements to the current Flash Forms.

Forta also mentioned that Macromedia has already started working on the details and specifications of the next major version of ColdFusion, codenamed Scorpio. After some initial research, they are focusing on innovating the presentation features and functionality of ColdFusion, and giving better monitoring of and access to the server internals. Ben requested feedback from those at the conference.

The third major announcement at the keynote was the most surprising. Macromedia will be actively supporting the CFEclipse project, a change from their previous singular focus on Dreamweaver as their IDE of choice. CFEclipse is an open source version of the Eclipse editor designed for ColdFusion programmers, spearheaded by Simeon Bateman, Spike Mulligan, and others. (Perhaps it was not so surprising to those who noted Macromedia's June 6th announcement that they were joining the Eclipse Foundation.)

This announcement was greeted with much applause. Information on CFEclipse can be found at their official website, http://www.cfeclipse.org. Bateman, spokesman for the CF_Eclipse project, said that there will be a new build of CFEclipse coming out soon, and that Version 2.0 will be coming out some time this fall. Stay tuned for a conference interview with Bateman coming soon on Fusion Authority, and check out the new House of Fusion CFEclipse list (cf-eclipse@houseoffusion.com).

The mood as the audience left the first keynote was somewhat euphoric, and the feeling was that ColdFusion is alive and growing.

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